I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I wouldn't want to try to adapt something of my own. It would be like going back to school and doing all my exams again.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.